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“... the young, or the literate classes, or – extraordinarily – the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas Robinson, a lapsed friar, in a pamphlet published in 1622 called The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, described the comfortable life of a father confessor to the nuns there: ‘Then after supper it is usual for him to read a little of Venus and ...”

“... in an almost desultory way, by Benny Goodman. ‘And now, Frank Sinatra …’ The 27-year-old Francis Albert Sinatra stepped up, and history turned a small corner. He was met by a tsunami of hysterical screams from a passel of young female fans. Goodman was initially thrown, completely struck dumb in fact, then looked over his shoulder and blurted ...”

“... rhetoricians, of Sidney or Puttenham, but rather the anti-rhetorical realpolitik of Machiavelli. Francis Bacon almost out-Marxed Marx when he cited Machiavelli in his speech to the House of Commons on 17 February 1607. Bacon explained how the learned Italian scorned the idea that ‘moneys are the sinews of war.’ Iron, says Bacon, is more fundamental than ...”

“... commercial success’. Castle calls these generative works ‘charismatic texts’, and gives Robinson Crusoe and the first Pamela as examples. ‘The readers of sequels,’ she says, ‘are motivated by a deep unconscious nostalgia for a past reading pleasure,’ and ‘the producers of sequels have always recognised and tried to exploit this subliminal ...”

“... lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the principles of law & liberty. Liberty, in our opinion, is but a modern invention (the growth of books and printing) – and whether new or ...”

“... of Borges and rat poison, half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles on the table at the Astor, hairy shoulders, Francis Bacon, ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine any more’ stuck in the groove on the Blind Beggar’s jukebox. But if they were looking for a hagio-graphic fix, a corn-plaster to staunch a terminal haemorrhage, they miscalculated badly. Pearson was not a tame ...”

“... Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third is largely taken up by letters to Wollstonecraft, and the volume at that point seems to make a new beginning. So ...”

“... of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not obvious why such names as Francis Coventry, Thomas Holcroft or Robert Paltock should be left out. (Not to mention James Boswell, author of Dorando.) The omission of John Cleland may be deliberate and provocative – it provokes me to cheerful assent – but Spender’s researches have ...”

“... we would have seen him as Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist and Jaggers in Great Expectations. It was Francis L. Sullivan, whose huge bulk must have been gracing the stage of the Grand that week, though we did not know it, thinking only that a creature from the celestial realms of film had materialised in, of all places, Leeds. We rushed home to tell ...”

“... didn’t buy it, but he was duty-bound to review the book. After much hesitation he assigned it to Francis Jeanson, ex-Alger républicain (and later a clandestine courier in France for the FLN). Jeanson took Camus apart. He saw his ‘thirst for moderation’ as a narcissistic abdication of reason. Why prefer rebellion to real collective action? And why on ...”

“... have in store for him. In ‘The Greatness of the Soul’, a sermon of 1682, he anticipates Robinson Crusoe’s fate when he imagines a man being ‘taken by them of Algiers, and there made a slave of, and there be hunger-bit, and beaten till his bones are broken’. The repeated b sounds and the mainly monosyllabic words give a physical texture to ...”

“... to have any images in these places,’ he said. ‘Just the landlord.’ He looked at the bust of Francis Lord Napier of Ettrick before he examined the pulpit.HEANEY: It’s high up. The first church I went to in Bellaghy was just a pulpit sticking out of a wall.MILLER: It is high up. Halfway up to heaven.Seamus climbed up to the pulpit. ‘My God,’ he ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on ...”

“... and associate W.B. Yeats, who pledged his support for Eoin O’Duffy’s militaristic Blueshirts. Francis Stuart, a self-condemned Irish Dostoevsky, who was also published in yellow-jacket Gollancz editions in the 1930s, had a special gift for putting himself on the wrong side of every political argument. He took himself off to wartime Berlin, where he made ...”

“... probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost reconciles one to the bulldozer. And there’s always ...”